Owing to economies of scale associated with higher production costs, it has been established that the optimum size for a cellulosic bio-fuels plant is four to five times larger than is the optimum grain to ethanol plant, depending on the type of conversion [1]. These centralized, large biomass processing plants will process up to 23,000 tonnes of biomass per day, creating serious transportation and biomass storage and handling problems and high expenses [2]. These studies have also found that for production of Fischer–Tropsch liquids,distributed ‘‘farm scale’’ fast pyrolysis units for production of high density bio-oil as an intermediate product to be gasified at the central plant can decrease the transportation costs. The transportation cost savings are enough to offset the higher operational costs and biomass costs. Additionally, the study found that the distributed pyrolysis model shields the operation from variations in delivery costs and crop yields as the overall processing costs have low sensitivity to these factors [2]. Presumably, these positive economic factors would